HERE AND NOW: Collecting Memories from Turtle IslandIndigenous perspectives and museum narratives03.09.2026, 10:30 Uhr
and 03.09.2026, 18:30 Uhr
Museum Ludwig

Where is Turtle Island, and why does it matter? 🌎

“Turtle Island” is what many Indigenous nations call the continent colonizers named America.

This ArtTalk asks a question museums rarely ask out loud: who gets collected, who gets remembered, and who decides?

We’ll start with Marie Watt’s Thirteen Moons, thirteen tin sculptures suspended overhead that ring softly when touched. The work honors the Jingle Dress Dance, an Ojibwe healing ritual that was banned for decades and survived anyway. Quiet resistance, made audible.

Nearby hang historic photochromes of “empty” American landscapes.

Empty only because the Indigenous people who lived there were left out of the frame.

We’ll also spend time with T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo) and Leon Polk Smith (Cherokee), two artists whose Indigenous identities shaped their work but who, for decades, were written into art history without it.

Why do some artists become famous and others get overlooked? Often it has less to do with talent than with who was doing the choosing.

This is the eleventh show in Museum Ludwig’s own HIER UND JETZT series, in which the museum periodically turns its own exhibition-making habits inside out. So this isn’t just an exhibition about Indigenous art. It’s a museum asking itself hard questions, in public.

Come look at a museum not as a neutral box, but as a space built from choices. Leave with sharper seeing and better questions.